Journeys With A Prothean
by gregories
Summary: "I put forward the idea of writing a book with Javik, and to my surprise, he said he would think about it. Perhaps it's a start." A collaborative work by Dr. Liara T'Soni and the once Commander Javik. / Historical approach of, you guessed it, all things Prothean. Expect field-guide tone to some chapters and limited use of headcanons to fill in the cracks.
1. Foreword: T'Soni

I was looking for a revelation, not a revolution.

All my life, I've been fascinated with these mysterious, long-since extinct people called the Protheans. A mighty race, data recovered from their unearthed relics dating back over 50,000 years have painted a majestic picture of a civilization than had at one time span the galaxy. For their influence and culture to leave such a mark on history, their numbers would have had to be staggering, their technology hundreds of thousands of years in the making, their society adroit and colorful. I had made the oldest mistake a researcher ever could: assuming. For a century I romanticized these people, believing they lived under a similar sort of savoir-faire to ours wherein the Protheans were the prominent rulers of several smaller, less developed races in a diplomatic form of government. It would take meeting one of their own to curtail such fanciful notions and set me on the proper path of enlightenment - that the Protheans were a ruthless empire who gave lesser nations two options: surrender themselves to their rule or face extermination.

While this disclosure does not change the history we have uncovered, it does paint a much different picture. Instead of seeing lack of evidence supporting wars between species during the Prothean era to suggest peaceful colonization from system to system, it can now be deduced that this is the result of effective imperialization, unwavering dominance over the other races of the time period. All except for the Reapers, who we in these dark days of the present see as the ideal unconquerable adversary. The Prothean I have conspired with to write this piece, Javik, was born into the Reaper threat and spent his life dedicated to eradicating the massive sapient life forms that had already been present for over a century before his time. A soldier first and foremost, since his discovery Javik has been at our side fighting for the cause. Insistent that we focus our energy solely on the Reapers made persuading him to help pen a novel prior to their extermination very difficult, but well worth the effort. The reason I gave that changed his mind, and hopefully will do the same for any pessimists reading this, is that we need to spread the word. So little knowledge about the Reaper's exists to even the most privy, top level operatives, be it their harvesting patterns, methods, and so on that we're fighting a galactic killer almost completely blind. The best way I can think of to spread our knowledge is a novel, albeit it being a little rushed in our haste to begin circulation, comprised of everything we've learned about this formidable foe.

Though my greatest dreams have been realized, a real life Prothean standing before me, able to convey the knowledge of 50,000 years ago, it was at a very heavy cost. My entire life has been focused around these magnificent people and understanding them better, and yet somehow I do not feel the victory in our find. Javik is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but his discovery was only in lieu of the Reaper invasion. I was looking for information and understanding, not to relive their people's greatest nightmare.

It is my hope that this book will give you the tools you need to better fight our enemy. If even one life is saved, our endeavor will not have been in vain.

Goddess be with you all.


	2. Foreword: Javik

Every advanced species in the galaxy may not have a tomorrow.  
All of our resources and energy should be devoted to the Reaper's destruction.  
And here I am, writing a book.  
Typing it, no less.

Despite how far this cycle has come and the significant advancement it has made against the Reapers, you people are still using keyboard interfaces to record the written word.  
A small but telling difference between your time and mine.

Perhaps my next book should be about upgrades to your technology.  
If there is a next book.


	3. Afore Prothean

**Chapter 1: Afore Prothean (Pre-Prothean)**

Many of you have heard about the Protheans in one form or another, mainly in headlines concerning their revered relics, science fiction novels glamorizing what the species might have been like, or hanar Enkindler folklore. For dozens of centuries they have been thought of as a mystery, an ends to a mean, godlike gateways to technology and culture that far surpass our own.

According to one of their kind, however, their story is actually a repetition and in no way as glorified as we believed. It was assumed centuries ago that the Protheans were the first spacefaring species to fall prey to the Reaper's harvesting. As it turns out, they were merely the most recent.

Before their time, a race called the Inusannon thrived at least 127,000 years ago. Their ruins acted much like the stepping stones the Prothean's relics served as for the advanced species of today. The Protheans developed mass effect technology from their predecessors just as we learned it from them. Much to the dismay and marvel of archaeologists, historians, professors, and philosophers everywhere, the Protheans were not the first species to thrive across galactic space.

Once you've recovered from that shock, take a deep breath before this next news: our galaxy is millions upon millions of years old. It is doubtful at best that the same planets we stand on existed at the start of time as we know it, if you adhere to the Creation Theory of a definitive galactic beginning and, one day, end. No one knows for sure just how many species have existed, how many planets created and destroyed, how many systems caved in upon themselves, engulfed in red giants, or swallowed up by black holes. There is no known way to keep information intact over that great a span of time. What we do know is that we are not the first to face the Reaper threat; they have been harvesting for thousands of millennia. Each Reaper is a product of a life-cycle, a sole species that dominated the galaxy during its existence that was garnered and used to create one of the massive sapient lifeforms that fall under the Capital Ship classification, equal in size to modern day dreadnoughts. Judging by the sheer size of Reaper forces, it can be assumed that the first Reaper predates 37,500,000 years. That does not include factoring in the potential losses their numbers may have incurred from previous species' attempts at self-preservation, the lesser troops made up of indoctrinated beings, or multiple Reaper creations during each species' span.

As far as knowledge we have obtained to date tells, it's entirely possible that the galaxy extends back one billion years ago.

We are a footnote upon the face of history.

The most ancient form of life that can be accounted for are the long-since reclusive Leviathans, who were the dominant race of their time and believed themselves to be the ultimate apex race. Little is known of them other than myths and the information obtained by both Commander Shepard of the Alliance Navy and Task Force Aurora of Systems Alliance. Pieces of information strewn across time and space have led us to believe that the Leviathans were a species who evolved on an unknown planet until they grew powerful enough to both create their own technology and enthrall other lifeforms of their planet, a necessity for marine life to observe and explore land and space. With the capability to enthrall other species, extremely similar if not identical to the process of indoctrination used by the Reapers, they considered any other form of life nothing more than tools to be utilized. As their numbers of thralls grew, patterns began to form. One they took action with was the creation of synthetic life. As time went on, more and more of their progressed thralls were destroyed by their synthetic creations. As a solution, the Leviathan in turn created an Intelligence, what we in the present day refer to as the Catalyst. It's purpose was simple: the preservation of life at all costs. It's solution, on the other hand, was much more deviant.

As the Intelligence sought out to master the problem presented to it by its creators, it in turn created troops to seek out genetic material from all species in the galaxy. If any of you reading this book are familiar with the Collector rumors, which as it turns out are more than just rumors, then this will sound very familiar to you. After a period of study and analysis, the Intelligence came to the unforeseen conclusion that all advanced lifeforms were their own demise. As their knowledge, technology, and resources grew, they in turn used it to create beings and weapons that would eventually cause their extinction. The only way to prevent this was to eradicate the most evolved species as they rose. With this disclosure, the Intelligence used its pawns to hunt the very creatures that created them, driving them quickly to near-defunct. Rather than wiping them from the face of the galaxy, the Intelligence saw fit to repurpose the Leviathans into Harbinger, the first of the Reapers, whose job would be to continue this process of "harvesting" throughout the millennia. Each Reaper was to be the uplifted perfection of said harvested race, its "pinnacle of existence," each fashioned after the species whose genetic data it was forged from. Proof of such was the Human-Reaper found and extinguished by Commander Shepard's squad on the Collector Base in 2186, whose construction took thousands of humans' DNA before it was destroyed while still in its larva state.

Very few other post-Prothean species are known of, though we speculate there is usually approximately a dozen moderate to advanced species existing during each 50,000 year span between Reaper invasions.


	4. The Ancients

**Chapter 2: The Ancients (Prothean Primitives)**

Before we continue, there is one point that needs to be made: the Prothean species and empire are two completely separate entities. The Prothean Empire was comprised of several species that had assimilated under the title "Prothean." However, when speaking of the Protheans as a species, it is in reference to the anthropoidal race that originally conquered the other species of their time and are now referred to as the "Enkindlers" by modern-day hanar, which is what this chapter will focus on. The difference, while subtle, is profound.

Knowledge passed from one Prothean to another much differently than any species of the present. Forced to endure harsh conditions on their home planet of Ze'tom, currently known as Nepmos in the Erebus System of the Styx Theta cluster, Prothean physiology developed extremely quickly for such a young species. The constant shifting of tectonic plates caused just as constant surface magma flow and made for difficult evolution of anything but basic forms of life. It was a "kill or be killed" planet. Somehow, natural selection deemed the early Protheans worthy of progression. It is believed that the DNA molecule composition with a unique "quad-strand" structure that is prevalent in all Prothean has something to do with their heightened ability to adapt and prevail. This genetic rarity was potentially the template for abnormalities in Prothean physiology such as the touch-sensory mechanism and other physical mutations such as the second set of eyes, another defining characteristic of their species.

The ancient Protheans closely mirrored that of the beginnings of human evolution: archaic beasts that once beat their chests and stumbled around the surface of their planet, more concerned with their next meal rather than the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps it is the beginning of all noteworthy races. A bipedal cross between crawfish and komodo dragons, their bleak gray exoskeleton would blend in with the equally bleak atmosphere of Ze'tom. The troposphere is comprised of an argon-sulfur dioxide that makes the stale air dense and slightly noxious to certain species. It is believed that the Prothean's lack of a definitive snout or nose protrusion is a result of this; their quad-slit nostril structure may have also played a part in helping to double-filter the toxic air they breathed. The Protheans thrived in such an environment, able to easily adapt to less toxic terrestrial planets with ease later on during the space-fairing era. The surface of the planet being similarly deprivating in its barren, volcanic state made for a difficult life planetside. Almost no vegetation can naturally grow in such harsh conditions, with only 3% of soil fertile enough to garden across the entire planet at any given time. The Protheans became nomadic creatures to compensate for their lack of a stable food source, often following herds of lesser prey as they searched for fresh streams untainted by the ever-prevalent lava flow. The number of "red rivers" easily outnumbers that of bodies of water, and the earliest form of cave carvings and paintings suggest the early Protheans both revered and feared the glowing red molten rock. It curbed the migration of the herds, killing several during volcanic eruptions, and shifted the environment constantly. In a mere month, a region's terrain could be completely unrecognizable to any land-going creature, forcing the Protheans to become instinctual hunters that did not rely on guerrilla warfare or tactical strategy. They relied on the brutal efficiency of their numbers and the earliest manifestations of their touch sensory mechanism to better coordinate their efforts.

While their species existed during the Inusannon-Reaper War, Ze'tom and its inhabitants remained as all unyielding races do when the Reapers begin their harvests: virtually untouched. There is almost no trace that they were even present during the time period, save for a small handful of specific cave paintings dating back to the geological cursor that would have marked a Reaper invasion, according to our estimates. The paintings are simple and deliberate, telling of skies blackened to a near eclipse state by enormous, flying sentients, similar to what we in the present day have experienced when a Reaper horde has chosen a planet to descend upon. Rather than descend, however, the Reapers merely passed over Ze'tom and moved on, perhaps to another planet of the same system to target.

The Inusannon presence on the Prothean homeworld was much more pronounced. Several artifacts and "gifts" were cultivated both before and after the Reaper eclipse. Be it seeds that could survive the little to no fertilized soil to rudimentary weapons the young race used to drive the less developed species dangerously close to near-extinction populations, and eventually wiping a few unlucky species like the Yiur and Gaplec off the face of the planet for good, the Inusannon played a large role in the uplifting of the Prothean race. Before their demise, the Inusannon managed to preserve the templates for their own technology and send them to relatively stable locations just beneath Ze'tom's surface for the quickly-advancing species to find at a time when the Reapers would hopefully have returned to dark space and leave them to pave the way for a new space-fairing era. Hints were made that the Inusannon had found a means by which to preserve themselves that would go unnoticed by the Reaper's radar. If they were successful in their endeavor, proof of which was never recovered. Though several projects were led during the later years of the Prothean civilization to reclaim artifacts of their era, no traces that the race had survived past the harvesting period were ever discovered.

Early architect suggests that the Protheans had indeed once lived out of not only caves, but trenches created by fissures that ran across the planets surface, and any shelter the terrain could provide from the elements. The trenches were the most unsafe route in an already unsafe environment; hunting parties, families, and the equivalent of small "villages" met their end as they sought refuge in the naturally made foxholes. Similar to the human city of Pompeii, unearthed clusters of casts of victims still in situ have been discovered continuously throughout the reign of the Prothean era. It is unlikely any have survived to the present day, the constant volcanic surface and always-moving tectonic plates varying the planets terrain drastically over the millennia. Some nomadic tribes were found huddled together, adults protectively surrounding their children, some running and crawling in their petrified effort to escape, while others still were found curled on their sides or sprawled out along the bottom of the fissure apparently in deep sleep. The ones who simply never woke up may have been the lucky ones.

As the environment was unforgiving, so became the Protheans. They developed as a race that sought out to survive and conquer at all costs, feral beasts that in time evolved to a higher thought process and perceived a higher purpose than their next meal. Discovery of the Inusannon tech was vital to their enlightenment, and paved way for a new age: Prothean space flight.


End file.
